Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I smiled. I know how creepy I am when I smile. Whoever came up with “skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood” and thought people would find it attractive really wasn’t thinking things through.”

— Seanan McGuire

152. “Your name is your heart, and you don’t give your heart away.”

— Seanan McGuire

153. “Enjoy yourself. There are many good things in the world, and each of them happens for the first time only once, and never again.”

— Seanan McGuire

154. “A cat that looks bored is a cat that’s getting ready to pounce.”

— Seanan McGuire

155. “It wasn’t fair to play games with the hearts of people who loved me. And they did love me – I had to admit that, or nothing would ever make sense again.”

— Seanan McGuire

156. “Every inch of ground on this planet is a palimpsest, scraped clean and overwritten a million times, leaving behind just as many ghosts.”

— Seanan McGuire

157. “No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.”

— Seanan McGuire

158. “This has never been about good and evil. This is about power. Who has it, who doesn’t. Who knows how to use it.”

— Seanan McGuire

159. “Home always shrinks in times of absence, always bleeds away some of its majesty, because what is home, after all, apart from the place one returns to when the adventure is over? Home is an end to glory, a stopping point when the tale is done.”

— Seanan McGuire

160. “Only by learning about the journeys of others can we truly understand our own.”

— Seanan McGuire

161. “Hope is a vicious beast. It sinks in its claws and it doesn’t let go.”

— Seanan McGuire

162. “We’re all puzzle boxes, skeleton and skin, soul and shadow.”

— Seanan McGuire

163. “There is kindness in the world, if we know how to look for it. If we never start denying it the door.”

— Seanan McGuire

164. “Katherine ignored her. Not maliciously: Katherine frequently didn’t hear her name the first time it was called, preferring to keep her nose in her book and continue whatever adventure she had decided was more interesting than the actual world around her.”

— Seanan McGuire

165. “We can be sad and we can be hurt and we can even be killed, but the world keeps turning, and the things we’re supposed to do keep needing to be done.”

— Seanan McGuire

166. “Because they’re the wrong colors, right? Somebody else’s rainbow.”

— Seanan McGuire

167. “You must be a lot of fun at parties,” said Christopher. Jack smirked. “It depends on the kind of party. If there are shovels involved, I’m the life, death, and resurrection of the place.”

— Seanan McGuire

168. “I hate paperwork,” announced Andy, looking up from his desk. “How is it that we have a form for ‘you got a gingerbread house dropped on your head’? How do we have a job where that’s something you’d need a form for?” “There’s.”

— Seanan McGuire

169. “I’m going to kill you.” “You look fine.” “I’m quite serious. I’m going to murder you. I’m going to murder you to death. And then, after I’ve finished doing that, I’m going to kill you again, just to be sure you got the point.” “Shelby, honestly, you look fine.”

— Seanan McGuire

170. “Not all the sparks that fly when the mortal lands and Faerie meet are bright ones.”

— Seanan McGuire

171. “Where did you find the whipped cream?” he asked. “You had milk, I had science,” said Jack. “It’s amazing how much of culinary achievement can be summarized by that sentence. Cheese making, for example. The perfect intersection of milk, science, and foolish disregard for the laws of nature.”

— Seanan McGuire

172. “There is wanting and there is needing, and when you want, you can make good choices, but when you need, it’s important the people around you not be looking to take advantage.”

— Seanan McGuire

173. “I like existing. I’m not ready to unexist just because of stupid causality. I didn’t invite stupid causality to my birthday party, so it doesn’t get to give me any presents.”

— Seanan McGuire

174. “This is how it should end. They won’t remember the way I died, but they’ll remember how I lived, forever. I was the monster under your bed, wasn’t I? I’ll be the monster waiting for your children.”

— Seanan McGuire

175. “Books were precious things, meant to be treated well, both because they deserved it and because if she didn’t treat them well, her parents might stop buying them for her.”

— Seanan McGuire

176. “Roger guesses people all over the world must use the same tone when they talk to the smart kids, like they were bombs on the edge of going off, instead of children with brains too big for the people they’re supposed to be.”

— Seanan McGuire

177. “People aren’t so good at being good to one another. We try hard enough, but something essential was left out in the making of us, some hard little patch of stone in the fertile soil that’s supposed to be our hearts. We get hung up on the bad, and we focus on it until it grows, and the whole crop is lost.”

— Seanan McGuire

178. “In the days when the faith in the Feathered Lords was waning, came Elizabeth Evans, called Beth, the kindly Priestess, who did find Us gathered in her yard and say Why Look At You, You Must be Starving. And she did gather Us in her apron and carry Us into her Home, which would be our Home thereafter, and say, You Are Safe Here, If You Will Follow the Rules I Set –.”

— Seanan McGuire

179. “Just because I wouldn’t go back if you paid me, that doesn’t mean I want to forget a second of what happened to me. I wouldn’t be who I am if I hadn’t gone to Prism.”

— Seanan McGuire

180. “I didn’t even feel my face hitting the pond. Everything was darkness, glorious darkness and the final, perfect absence of pain. It was done, all of it, the running and the fighting, and the pain. After everything that I’d gone through, it was finally over, and this time, the water would carry me home.”

— Seanan McGuire

181. “One, a shy girl with brown braids and thick glasses, had confessed that her world was at a nexus between two minor compass directions, being High Rhyme and High Linearity. Nancy hadn’t known what to say to that, and so she hadn’t said anything at all. Increasingly, that felt like the safest option she had.”

— Seanan McGuire

182. “You know what, honey? You’re right. It’s time to change my approach. Can you give me one of those nice concussion grenades?”

— Seanan McGuire

183. “No one should have to sit and suffer and pretend to be someone they’re not because it’s easier, or because no one wants to help them fix it.”

— Seanan McGuire

184. “This, you see, is the true danger of children: they are ambushes, each and every one of them. A person may look at someone else’s child and see only the surface, the shiny shoes or the perfect curls. They do not see the tears and the tantrums, the late nights, the sleepless hours, the worry. They.”

— Seanan McGuire

185. “Hopefully, anyone who saw a woman riding a screaming mermaid in a wheelchair down Leavenworth at a quarter to five in the morning would just think they’d had too much to drink.”

— Seanan McGuire

186. “The petty-minded fools here think surgery and butchery are the same thing.”

— Seanan McGuire

187. “Never bring a weapon too big to double as a dining utensil to the table when dining with friends.”

— Seanan McGuire

188. “Please stop using the time distortion field to age your cheese. It is an inappropriate use of scientific resources, and anyway, you can’t start with Velveeta and expect to get anything decent out the other end.”

— Seanan McGuire

189. “She considers pit traps and high explosives the appropriate solution to almost every problem.”

— Seanan McGuire

190. “When a very serious little girl finds a magical door in the woods, she decides to leave behind a life of loneliness to go off in search of adventure, never expecting to find a mystical Market on the other side – where anything can happen, as long as you pay your debts.”

— Seanan McGuire

191. “We hated each other so well and loved each other so badly...”

— Seanan McGuire

192. “It must have been very difficult, being Sloane.”

— Seanan McGuire

193. “Australia basically holds the copyright on “weird ecosystem.” The only place where you’re going to find weirder things is at the bottom of the ocean, and no one suggests that you go there for a fun family vacation.”

— Seanan McGuire

194. “Oh, her? She had raised a hand against us, and willingly entered our circle. We ate her.”

— Seanan McGuire

195. “At least my headache was almost gone. I always deal better with emergencies when I’m not actively in pain.”

— Seanan McGuire

196. “Come here, she said. “I need to hold someone, and you need to be held. It’s a fair trade. Just for a little while, and then we can go on being what we are.”

— Seanan McGuire

197. “The Archivist, who had seen a thousand friendships become unbalanced by assumptions about who owed who, even when no one walked cloaked in feathers, was silent for a moment.”

— Seanan McGuire

198. “When the time comes for my current mortal face to end- and it will come, much as I might wish this time could last forever- I will understand the man I must manufacture as my next self all the better because of the children, and their comics. And besides, the X-Men offer many powerful life lessons to which even the eldest among us should attend.”

— Seanan McGuire

199. “Some questions are okay. You can’t have people without questions. People are too curious for that, they’d get all gummed up and stop working right if you didn’t let them have questions once in a while. But there’s a big difference between asking for things and only asking. ‘Do you think there will be grapes sometime this week’ isn’t the same as ‘can I have some of those grapes.’ Do you understand?”

— Seanan McGuire

200. “That’s basically the cherry on top of this week’s sundae of suck.”

— Seanan McGuire